For the Journeyman

The road’s black business runs thick with the hoarseness of tyres,
with the rattle of high-sided vehicles, the lull of household names,
storage, haulage, shopping malls, cheap components, chain-store
halls, white goods, car parts, sofas, beds, special moments, turn out
the light, sleep-well-my-darling, just one more night’s breakneck
hurtling through this two-lane highways’ sun-set drawn-out dusk.

Traffic noise rises, leaches like a sales-pitch: a distant, persistent
roar beyond the barriers where pylons on the long march south split
the wind like desiccated spider-corpses hung on strands of silk,
towering, inscrutable pylons like beads on string,
tight with electricity

Distant snow on mountain heath throws white shapes on dark;
hill-fog coils in wisps over drumlins and moraine-dammed lochs,
through ragged stratocumulus, one single contrail cuts the sky in two.

A gradient of rain and sun bends weary light across a watery sky and
my spirit beneath it, mercurial, barometric, a moistened finger,
tells me which way today’s insipid gale is blowing.

A bleak, raw twilight drags the day to bed and late-arriving winter
gnaws its cold chill into landscape, making solid
what once was supple.

A hundred thousand bare trees are standing, hungry for change:
naked birch, shriven alder, dwarf- and goat-willow, skeleton larches,
stark and haloed after time’s persistence oxidised the colours of
yesterday into rust’s indelible brown and the colours of tomorrow,
in stem and root, are waiting in secret to be alive again.

Daylight fails like the empty promise it was as approaching night
filters into dimness, until only road remains, stone and metal, and
the lights of traffic, head- and tail-, flicker like unintended stars.

Winter’s back has been broken and twilight plots the season’s
overthrow in a gleam of sky; in hinted green, leftover buds,
the last of summer, will struggle through to reach
the first turning corner of spring.

But I am alone with it now, watching a hundred black crows fly
in patterns above a devastated stand of trees, as if birds too
must hold the line, even when every other line lies broken and
twisted, when every line is scattered to the fourteen winds
in cracked, chaotic pieces.

So, this is the narrative of change, inescapable change, unalterable
change: the past has been the enemy and the unruly present hardly
a friend; but who can think about tomorrow with the tail-end
of winter long overdue and now so warm and yet, still so little light?

In this landscape, the relentless, endless black road refuses ever
to change; it twists and turns, fights the compass for direction
but leads, in the end, only to itself, going on forever while,
under this oblique sky with its clouds with its birds and weather
and dissident climate, I am ready for time to revive, ready for life
to unwind and unreel from spool or deck or dashboard and stream
itself back from the future’s unintelligible record, as shapeless rain.

© BH, 2019

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Another long journey up and down the A9. Apart from the way vibration on a bus makes your handwriting appear geriatric (or unhinged), recording the passing world accumulates pages of spidery words for later contemplation.

I’ve been working this since the 22nd January after I keyed it as a first draft. Here, it’s traffic, commerce and a landscape overlaid with weather. And time. There’s always time…

…and here's the poem read for you, with the sounds of going… by my good self…